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It’s 1950. The red cliffs of Arizona and Utah protect a small community where men have more than one wife.

The sand doesn’t grow tomatoes well. Cucumbers wither. Big turnips grow like weeds.

The schoolhouse is as small as the few children who attend it, while Grandpa’s old Model T Ford struggles on trips to any organized civilization.

Below the red cliffs of Colorado City we find one of the most fascinating stories of how humans operate.

From the skyscrapers in New York City and poor villages in India to right here in the polygamist town of Short Creek, humanity has not escaped the phenomenon of human psychosis.

Discover with me the very normal human behavior that slowly etched into existence the religious town and cult that became veiled in secrecy for so many years.

Together we can see how growing tomatoes and struggling for life can turn into crazy cults. And hopefully we can save ourselves from the terrors of psychosis.

The Day I Realized I Was Living in a Different Reality

You know that big store Scheels. I had been wanting to go in there from the time I arrived in Fargo, North Dakota in 2019.

The land there was so flat. Storms rolled in from far away. People talked different.

Something was off.

Around Fargo people treated me differently. Why didn’t I fit in at all?

One day I watched another man my age get help from a Scheels employee. Their conversation was casual, like they had gone to school together. They made a joke or two and carried on like nothing happened.

The Scheels staff loved helping me as well. When I made jokes they either burst out laughing or stared at me like a zombie.

Different is all I was.

It’s funny for about ten seconds. After a few interactions in North Dakota, I recognized something.

I lived in an entirely different existence than these people.

My brain didn’t connect the same things theirs did. Nothing normal to them was normal to me.

My Grandfather’s Loyalty and the Cost of Belief

The red cliffs above Colorado City had an occasional visitor back in the 1950s. My grandfather.

He loved logic. He built a successful business and at one point wrote a $100,000 check for his tithing. A man who shook your hand and kept his promise.

But he stayed true to Warren Jeffs until the day he died.

His family was broken apart.

He spent several years in a Texas prison because he married his daughter at twelve years old to Warren Jeffs.

But he stayed loyal the whole time.

Standing with my grandfather behind his old home below the red cliffs one Sunday afternoon in 2017, he spoke feelings that were hard to say out loud. His face seemed to ache at the memory of what he once had.

How things had changed from the glory days my mother told stories about.

Grandpa didn’t have the words to say what he felt. His face told me everything I needed to know.

Pain.

I would describe it more like anguish.

Here was a man who had grown up from boyhood through the glory years of the 1990s beneath those cliffs. And how he loved them.

But he loved something more.

He loved his community, his family, and most of all his God.

But that love broke him.

It shattered his family. It shattered his community and religion, leaving him a broken-hearted man.

The Invisible Rules That Define “Normal”

Let’s go back to Fargo, North Dakota for a moment and check in with twenty-one-year-old me.

I’m starting to notice what normal is in Fargo. It shows up in people’s mannerisms, in what they enjoy doing and talking about.

People back in Colorado City have similar patterns. Everyone has their mannerisms and ways they think.

In both places people like coffee and sleep.

People in Fargo who hear my story think the polygamists under the red cliffs in Arizona are crazy cult people.

But to me, the people back in Colorado City are normal.

Like my grandpa who worked hard. Who taught me to work hard.

When the Cult Was Simply Home

I occasionally miss those days on our cult compound in Texas as a young boy. The sun was too bright and the temperature is well over 100 degrees.

Every day at one o’clock all the men meet for prayer. The hardest-working men I have ever known.

Some of them have one wife. Some five. Others have ten.

But all of them work twelve to sixteen hours a day.

I know because I’m right there with them, building concrete walls, framing houses, and growing fields of corn and beans.

Here everything is normal for me.

I never wonder why I can’t fit in.

I’m just one of the people there, going along and doing everything.

The jokes I say land naturally.

This is home.

How The Community Created Its Own Reality

When I was in Fargo, I finally figured out what normal was for them.

When I lived in Rexburg, Idaho, I figured out what normal was for them. I did the same thing in Utah.

Everywhere people like a good dinner and sleep.

But every place had a different version of normal from where I grew up, the FLDS community.

So I decided that everywhere I go, let me try to fit in. If I can understand the psychosis of the people there, I can fit in.

In Fargo, normal was different from Utah. I saw that people’s baseline thoughts merge together over decades into a shared understanding with each other.

You see it in a group of friends who grew up together. Inside jokes, norms, traditions.

I didn’t fit in anywhere because I hadn’t been exposed to their way of life.

My normal was so far from theirs that everything they did made me question why they did it. Things that seemed obviously necessary to them made me strain my brain trying to understand why.

Once I understood, I could fit in.

But by then I had already seen too much.

I began analyzing people’s normal with a magnifying glass. Everything from sex and dating to jokes and the way people treat each other.

I started calling it group psychosis.

A place where people cannot see beyond their baseline normal.

That insight gave me just enough distance to look back at my own roots.

What was the psychosis beneath the red cliffs of Colorado City?

How “Normal” Slowly Mutated For The Polygamists

In 1950 the community of Colorado City began changing its normal.

Normal does not change overnight. It changes slowly across years and decades.

Normal was changing everywhere in the world. But very uniquely in the polygamist community.

Warren Jeffs took control in 2002. But baseline normal beneath the red cliffs started changing long before him.

In 1953 the police raided the small polygamist town. A new normal emerged.

Fear of outsiders trying to destroy the religion.

My grandpa remembered that.

To him, normal meant sticking together and staying loyal.

When people say, “You wouldn’t understand” that is sometimes correct.

Normal goes deeper than you think.

Normal is a frequency. A vibration. It is in the air people breathe and the food they eat.

Normal is not just the way people talk. It is the shared thoughts they have, the frightening experiences they go through together, the coincidences they interpret together.

It is the religious power they feel in group settings with one another.

Normal is the ideas they plant in each other that sprout and grow into decades of change.

Religion Became the Gravity of the Community

To Christians, the idea of Jesus coming back is certain.

They live inside that reality.

Yet normal life still feels ordinary.

Beneath the red cliffs it was not much different.

Normal meant Jesus would return.

Normal meant waking up and working. Enjoying a good dinner.

But there was a difference.

Religion pulled harder on normal there. It reshaped priorities and slowly changed the baseline over decades.

My grandpa loved his business. He loved his family. He loved his daughter.

But none of that was as important to him as God.

That was normal beneath the red cliffs.

To me as a young boy, what could be more important than obeying God?

If I were living in Fargo or Salt Lake City, I might compare it to going to school. It was simply the priority.

An outsider looks at my grandpa and sees a crazy man who sacrificed everything and gave up his twelve-year-old daughter.

But when I was a boy, he seemed like one of the most grounded men I knew.

Because I shared the same psychosis.

That is also why the of people in Fargo, ND blew my mind.

They seemed largely focused on themselves.

For a time I thought surely my psychosis was the higher morality.

Why Intelligent People Follow Dangerous Leaders

My grandpa’s normal started the day he was born.

He believed loyalty to God and the community mattered more than money or even family.

He started a business and raised children. By most measures he was successful.

What he did not understand was this.

Humans beneath the red cliffs of Colorado City are not different from humans in New York City or Tokyo.

But their psychosis is.

The normal they do not know they have.

Reality arranges itself around that.

When my grandpa was a young man, his community rewarded him for giving tithing, time, and loyalty.

In return he received approval, belonging, and authority.

His wives and children looked up to him with one condition.

He had to put God and the prophet first.

When he gave his twelve-year-old daughter to Warren Jeffs, he did not believe he was harming her.

He believed he was doing what the red cliffs had taught him since childhood.

Put God before yourself.

Put God before your family.

Devotion Without Freedom

Men in my community worked twelve-hour days.

Some had five or ten wives.

But the truth is these men had far less luxury than an ordinary middle-class monogamous couple.

The luxury they lacked was freedom and autonomy.

They were raised inside a religious psychosis that made them yearn for God.

The expectation that Christ would return, an idea already strong in the 1950s, grew into a powerful longing. It’s what everyone talked about and gathered together over.

A leader eventually took that longing and pushed it further.

He himself was deep inside the same psychosis.

No money, no idea, no community member mattered more than the goal of seeing Jesus return.

Ordinary Men Living Inside Extraordinary Belief

My grandpa was a normal man.

I joked with him. Rode in his truck with him and stopped by Starbucks with him.

Just like anyone else, he worked for a living and enjoyed simple things.

But he truly placed the return of Jesus Christ above everything else.

The community rewarded him for that devotion.

And then it took everything away from him.

This is one reason I mock other religions.

They say one thing but live another way.

The thing that scares me is something different.

True belief is psychosis.

If you really believe something, you act on it. You walk as if it will happen.

Jesus said if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed you could tell a mountain to move.

The community beneath the red cliffs came closer than most communities ever will to actually bringing about the return of Jesus Christ.

Normal in Fargo or Utah was different because people did not truly put God’s return first.

Many claim they do.

But what matters is not what someone reads or says they believe.

What matters is what their community shows them is important.

The level of psychosis they inherit from the people around them.

The Universal Pattern We Saw In The Polygamists

The community beneath the red cliffs looks like an isolated event.

But that is a misunderstanding of human nature.

At our core we all reach for something beyond what we see.

In politics this might be a future government we believe in.

In business it might be a system that promises wealth.

And inside humans there is the desire to live forever.

Religion and spirituality can fulfill that longing more powerfully than almost anything else.

But spiritual power can also open the door to manipulation people never see coming.

The problem is we can’t see own psychosis clearly enough to change course before it’s reality hits us.

That is what happened to the polygamist community.

The red cliffs created a fairy-tale world of hard work, tight community, and unbreakable bonds. It’s the glory days I’ve heard so many from the polygamist community talk about.

By the time most of the community realized they were inside a psychosis, it was too late.

Their families were gone.

The community they loved was shattered.

The red cliffs brought sorrow before they understood what had happened.

Normal people.

Hard-working families.

All caught together inside a force of religious psychosis that destroyed everything.

Men with five wives did not work sixteen-hour days because they were forced to.

They did it because they believed with absolute conviction that they were helping prepare the world for the return of Jesus Christ.

Prison, financial loss, or families being broken apart only strengthened that conviction.

Until finally, like my grandpa, the only choice left was to stay delusional to the only cause you had ever known while his final years faded into memory.

You would also enjoy this article: How Warren Jeffs Controlled All 79 of His Wives

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My podcast this last week was with a young woman named Alyssa. She left the mormon church but still sees a lot of good in it. Watch our conversation right here: